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To follow up on my rant yesterday, I suspect that today’s visual designers obsession with minimalist, simple design with “large margins” is a reaction to our current digital age.

To contrast, you can observe the way visual design in the mid 80s and 90s embraced sensory over-stimulation, from nearly chaotic representations of “cyberspace”, to fluorescent colors everywhere. Even then, this wasn’t particularly new, as this was influenced by LSD-inspired overly detailed design, that influenced visual arts and movies through the early 2000s with Heavy Metal, Druillet and the well-known Moebius.

But now, there’s a nearly anti-intellectual counter-culture from pseudo-technologists that gravitate towards new-agey, faux-spiritual simplification. The age of “too clean” science-fiction, which took a strong “cyberpunk” movement to get away from it, is now coming back, but oddly enough without the utopian ideology and just emptiness.

And that was the point I was trying to make. That “white space design” ultimately tends to be just too short of content, be it philosophical, political, spiritual or otherwise, to be even worty of its inherent pretentiousness. So if you don’t have much to say, then embellish it so that at the very least you’re entertaining.

Says the guy that owns a white iPhone 4S. Give me a break…